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Field Stories

The theme for this year’s World Immunization Week is “Closing the Immunization Gap” a slogan which challenges countries and public health practitioners around the world to address inequity in vaccination coverage.

India is a big, bustling, multidimensional place, full of achievements that are both impressive and surprising. India, for example, is the largest democracy in the world and has the world’s largest postal system, the longest road network, and the most English speakers of any country on Earth.

When something disappears, people tend to panic, except when what has gone missing is a dreaded disease like measles. Cambodia hasn’t reported a single confirmed case of measles since November of 2011, while its neighbors continue to face outbreaks, illness and death from this vaccine-preventable disease...

The “clues” were everywhere. And in this case in rural South Sudan there were as many rumors as facts about an outbreak of yellow fever in Aweil, Northern Bahr el Ghazal State. So when Surveillance Officer David Deng began investigating, he followed a newly-learned approach that stressed discipline, thoroughness and data...

Elisabeth Pukuta Simbu is a biologist at the national laboratory in the Democratic Republic of the Congo where she and her colleagues detect devastating vaccine preventable illnesses such as rotavirus diarrhea and bacterial meningitis....

When 35-year-old Shafeeque Ahmad went to the three-week STOP program orientation in Atlanta, he knew he was probably the only one in the group of 177 from all over the world who had spent the majority of his school life studying in an Islamic school (madrassa).

Geospatial data have been used in public health since John Snow mapped cholera cases around the Broad Street water pump during the London cholera epidemic of 1854. And, while global positioning system technologies (GPS) are so ubiquitous in the United States that virtually all new smartphones, tablets and cars have this technology embedded, in many areas of the world, health care workers in the field are often without the most basic two-dimensional paper maps.

Imagine having to balance your check book to decide if you could afford to make a major purchase if you had no idea of how much money you have in your account or how much you’ve spent. The best you can do is guess. In order to effectively balance your check book and make your purchase, you need accurate information (data).

In 2010, an earthquake of high magnitude tore through Haiti, the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, causing destruction on a scale that most people can’t even imagine. More than 200,000 lives were lost and another 2 million people were displaced when their homes were destroyed.

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